


Night Sea Journey

by Morwynn



Category: Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan
Genre: Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Healing, Past Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22963297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morwynn/pseuds/Morwynn
Summary: Moiraine has a distinctive personality and a particular set of skills that come from somewhere. During her captivity with the Finn, they feast on the emotions she feels when she finally confronts the childhood in the Sun Palace that made her who she is, for better and worse.
Relationships: Moiraine Damodred/Siuan Sanche, Moiraine Damodred/Thom Merrilin
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	Night Sea Journey

Moiraine stood naked before the Finn, a sick reversal of her test for the shawl. 

In a bit of gallows humor, she had darkly joked to herself that if the Finn sustained themselves on feelings, they would find her a poor feast. To match her icy exterior, she honed herself to be as hard and cold as Maradon river ice on the inside, to be as hard as she must be. But she could not deny that her surface serenity and implacability disguised sinister depths of deep, volatile emotions hidden and shoved away until almost forgotten. She stuffed them in drawers and then shut the drawers, concealing them not only from the outside world, but also concealing them from herself. She could not feel her own fear even as the Finn inhaled it before her. She could barely even feel the sting of the fresh cut on her lip from the fight at the docks an hour and a lifetime ago. Fear and pain only distracted, and she could never afford distractions. 

“Thus is the agreement made!” an angular male, the tallest of the four present, barked in such a tone that forbade disagreement from any person or creature standing in that endless hall of black stone and sickly yellow light. Moiraine’s stomach clenched, an icy jab of fear jolting through her middle. Just like that, her captivity began. She had placed herself in the trap, and the jagged jaws snapped shut. Trapped. 

Her mind attempted to calculate the next move, her thoughts scrambling like panicked hands searching for a deadbolt in the dark, fingers scrabbling over doorknob and door frame. _What next? What happens next?_ The rings in Rhuidean had guided her requests and how to make them to the Finn; beyond that, the memories from the rings went black, save for one last clue. The sense of paralyzing dread, the final remembrance of this place that she carried from Rhuidean, rang in her ears until she could barely hear the excited huffs and yips of the Finn or the strange, soft hum that radiated from the lights. But the ringing was no longer the memory; it had become her reality at last as she finally caught up to her future. One of her futures. Light, she prayed she knew which one. 

“The agreement is made!” another yipped, providing an echo that the strange stone chamber would not.

“Feel her power! Feel her fear! The _savor_ ,” cried a third, voice pulsating with eagerness. 

The original speaker, the Finn closest to her, ran an anxious hand back and forth over a leather strap across his chest, back and forth, as if he could not bear to wait. Like slavering hounds straining against restraints and set free at last, the Eelfinn behind him sprang forward. A tall female snatched Moiraine’s dress from its silken puddle on the cold floor. A stocky male grabbed her sapphire necklace, kesiera, and golden snake ring from beside the dress, Moiraine barely registering her final glimpse of the beloved possessions that marked her Cairhienin and Aes Sedai. A blank slate, her naked body stood firm and still as she began to lose feeling in her limbs, her mind trying to flee from this captivity if her body could not. 

The rest of the creatures, six assorted males and females, including the one who had spoken, converged upon her, clutching her back and pulling her arms. Despite their initial canine enthusiasm, they were not rough as they guided her, but soft and gliding as their voices while they greeted her in their most persuasive, hypnotic voices. 

“Come, come, let us savor you now,” a female with a dark red mane cooed as her fox-fur fingers caressed Moiraine’s bare arm.

“Savor you now,” another female agreed, her orange eyes glinting. “Your power, your fear.” 

“Your power, your fear!” the stocky male reiterated, his long white skirts swishing as his hands guided Moiraine forward by the shoulders. “The strength of them both, it is a feast!” 

“A feast!” yipped another male, holding her right hand in his left as he walked quickly ahead, glancing at her every other step. He appeared to be young, perhaps not quite an adult, with his short steps and slender frame. Perhaps she would be his equivalent of a lad’s first taste of ale with his father, she thought, her own thoughts bubbling up through the fog of the soft voices of the Finn. Reflexively, she fought their trance-inducing tones, her instinct always to resist. Yet, there would be no resisting here. The agreement had been made. She had consented to this ritual, to feeding them her feelings. Stabbing fear and roaring panic rose, washed over her, and receded, like a tide sucking the waves back out to sea. In their wake, cold, numb resignation flooded in. Rough, choppy waters became still and black. Trapped. Moiraine could barely feel the hands on her arms, the fuzz of their auburn fur, or the cool slickness of the ter’angreal bracelet. Her body could not leave this place, but slowly and then all at once, she let her mind give in. She unclenched her futile mental defenses, and the spell of the Finn poured in, soft, tempting, and sweet.

“Yes, over here, here is where we will savor you,” another voice said, deep and guttural, as another pair of gentle hands pressed on her shoulder blades, urging her forward as others continued to pull from in front. 

“Savor! The power and the fear!”

“The power and the fear!” 

They walked with her only a moment, or several moments. How many times had her heart beat since they began this walk? How many times had she breathed? She could not say. Everything seemed surreal. She was trapped. She could only register that the eight Finn surrounding her had finally brought her to her new home here. They had brought her to a long, low rectangle of smooth grey stone. 

_A funeral slab,_ her own voice observed, sharp and quick, cutting through the fog of the Finn’s mesmerism before retreating again. She let the Finn in, inviting them to persuade her that this moment, this ritual, this treatment, would not be torture. She lay on the slab, hands folded over her stomach, a warm and hazy mist enveloping her like a down blanket. Her muscles, which she had not realized had tensed up, loosened once more. Resignation. 

The Finn hurried to take their places on the fluted columns, one for each of them, the faint scent of the animal den growing stronger as if they filled the air with pheromones in their excitement. Contained in the mist, eyes closed, body going numb, her mind slowly yielding, Moiraine’s awareness of her surroundings slipped. The hungry barks and howls dissipated, the fox den stink faded, the jaundiced light dimmed, and the glassy cool surface of the slab melted away until she was only her mind. The Finn came to meet her there, shifting like nosy guests who inspected every untidy room behind an unlocked door, the open lock an invitation, the closed door a promise of a secret just beyond. Secrets tasted better than clean public rooms full of sunlight, and Moiraine, her inner life already deadening and huddling in the corner, face covered, pointed the Finn toward the hidden mental files she knew they craved.

The card catalog of her most private self contained entire rows of forbidden drawers, locked up and sealed with pitch, never to be opened, never to be touched, never to receive so much as a glance. A dark childhood in the Sun Palace built the foundation for the ordeals she would face in the coming years, teaching her to cauterize her bleeding heart until she could no longer feel it. She had spent the past two decades denying herself everything unrelated to her mission; she had needed that big heart to fan her passion for her quest, and she had needed to cut herself off from her own heart to do what must be done in carrying that quest out. 

Hungrily, the greedy Finn had thrown open those drawers one by one, holding up her buried traumas to the light, examining them like so many pretty baubles in a museum, twisting them first this way, then that, sampling them, putting them back, creating an overview of their stock before delving into deep study. And how they had studied. 

“Channel,” came the low, husky growl of the original speaker. 

“Channel,” yipped a high-pitched female voice. 

“Channel, channel! We wish to savor!” 

“Channel for us!” 

The chorus of joyous voices entreated so sweetly that Moiraine complied. In the cocoon the Finn made for her, the hypnotic voices and the warm, caressing mist pressed down like a pillow over the screaming face of her panic. Channeling seemed like such a soothing idea, her soul drawing a deep breath, holding it, and then releasing it slowly. With the bracelet, she could draw so much--so much saidar, so much invigorating life. She drew deeply, more deeply than ever before, like taking a breath in and in and in, the miraculous augmentation of the bracelet making her dizzy and giddy, her world expanding into sunlight and lushness and vivid color, until awe and joy had crowded out her fear and anxiety until--

Something started sucking the breath out of her, sucking her life out of her, like bleeding her to death through papercuts. _What is happening?_ her own quaking voice cried in her mind, sounding almost like a child’s in its rising panic. She tried hard to draw more Power. But the harder she tried, the quicker it ripped away from her, like dropping a sugar cube in a teacup and scrambling to gather up the granules as they vanished, one by one, into the tea. _No, no, no!_ she wailed inside her mind, although her own thoughts still came muffled through that thick, sense-dulling fog. Brutally, the soothing effects of drawing the One Power wrenched into sickness. Moiraine’s desperate bewilderment yielded to a dawning dread as she realized what the Finn so wantonly savored. Not just her emotions. 

“Pair the power with the fear!”

“Taste the power with the grief!”

“The grief and the fear and the power!” 

“The power and the pain!” 

The sibilant voices tumbled one over the other, rowdy dinner guests all clamoring to order first, holding out cups, demanding they be filled to the brim. 

Moiraine howled like an animal in a trap. For how long, she did not know, but it felt like weeks before her wordless cries turned to silent tears. The Tower of Ghenjei was her prison, but being left alone inside her own mind made the real torment. Suppressing decades of hurt, she sat uneasy in her own skin, where the secrets and feelings she ran from dwelled. Unprotected physically, mentally, emotionally, she would have bartered away the right to wear clothes ever again for the promise of a fig leaf to cover the memories they coldly exposed. She would have relived her most repressed memories every day for the promise of getting her ability back. In her memories, she was a sad and scared little girl; without her ability, she was no one. 

The Finn greedily gobbled their double dessert: her Power, and her sorrow at the loss of it, mixed with her reactions to her buried traumas as they pulled them to the surface. Feeling them eating her emotions felt awful, and her awful feelings tasted good to them too, a recursive loop seemingly without end. It was not so much that it felt like the process lasted a long time, it was that there was no concept of time, as though she were perpetually stuck in a dismal, unchanging present, her recollections of events in the land of the Finn coming foggy and patchy. She had no idea how long her captivity had lasted. It could have been days; it could have been months. 

With the bracelet on, her Power made a banquet, and the Finn came hungry. The more they ate, the faster she drained, until it felt like the Power leaving her gushed like blood pouring out of a mortal wound. She grasped desperately at the flecks of Power left, watching in horror as the bright sun of the Source slowly dimmed to a pinprick of light in the dark. Her capacity to draw vast quantities of the Power remained; only her ability to do so diminished. Only able to channel a spark when she spent her life conjuring conflagrations, her lungs opened for air that would not come. Instead, the wind had been knocked out of her, and she flailed, gasping for breath, for life, that her body was no longer capable of giving. 

Aes Sedai serenity useless here, she wailed as the pinprick waivered, unable to bear the thought of what would come next. Her worst fear-- becoming powerless, vulnerable. Trapped. On the precipice of draining her last crumb, the Finn stopped. Lying on the slab they put her on, hands covering her face as she sobbed tearlessly, she did not understand what was happening, only that everything suddenly faded to black and she was gone. 

***

That cycle became the routine. 

She did not know how many days--weeks?-- had passed, but this made the third time they-- it was the Aelfinn this time-- had roused her from that strange, coma-like sleep. Like lurching awake from a nightmare and grasping the knife hidden under the pillow, she reflexively seized saidar and gasped. She flooded with the One Power, bracing and sweet, soft and revitalizing, hitting like a wave slapping down over her head, more than she had ever drawn in her life, more than she had drawn even in that first awful moment she felt them start to drain her. For the third time, she wept softly, unable to stop the tears, relief mixing with her confusion and exhaustion. 

As had happened twice before, she awoke to find her powers fully restored-- slightly _more_ than fully restored, in fact, although reassurance came uneasily with the knowledge that the Finn would simply use her up again and again, indefinitely. Trapped. 

_Not indefinitely. Mat, Thom, and one other will come. They_ will _come._

 _Trapped. But_ not _forever._

But what did “not forever” mean in a place where time was meaningless? 

As cautious as the previous times, she flexed her ability as one flexed a broken arm that had been Healed, testing how well it worked. As much as relief flooded her when she drew that deep breath of the One Power, apprehension rushed in too. What was real here? What were they doing to her?

In her world, Aes Sedai only hypothesized about the physical nature of the ability to channel and how it differed between women who had the potential versus women in whom the ability came inborn. Only strange ter’angreal and drawing too much of the Power could burn a woman out, and most theories revolved around those documented experiences. Nothing in her world could drain a woman slowly like what the Finn did to her, and she could only speculate about the nature of what was happening to her here. 

Every time she awoke provided one more scrap of information. She increasingly came to the conclusion that her ability to channel worked like building muscle, a process she had felt through years of Delving and Healing Lan. When exercising a muscle, first the muscle breaks down; then as it repairs itself, it grows back even stronger where it was torn. It was the only theory she could think of to explain why she became slightly _more_ powerful after recuperating from each draining session. It must have been an organic process; if the Finn had control over how much of the One Power she could draw, they would not have been so motivated to let her have the bracelet, and they surely would have imbued her with an even greater capacity to make their feedings as succulent as possible from the outset. 

This moment, immediately upon waking, her thoughts came clearest, before they settled down into the fog and into her own memories. In these moments of clarity, she theorized that the Finn were putting her in storage when they put her to sleep, finding her inedible and thus useless until she regenerated. They took great gastronomic pleasure in sampling the full spread of her emotions, dredged out of her by the memories they rooted around for, finding new combinations of feelings to pair with her draining Power. For the third time, they took her out of the ice box, beginning as they always did with their appetizer, her childhood. 

Hands on a lock. A girl’s hands, slender and pale, resting on a lock, shut and latched, in a darkened room. Feelings of safety on the heels of worry. Moiraine could not recall anything else from this memory except the image of her hands and that sequence of feelings, yet the Finn delighted in it. Their delight made her uneasy. When no new emotion flowed from the image, they moved on. 

In a grand hall of the Sun Palace hung a spectacular tapestry of the tale of Avendoraldera, woven centuries ago, not long after Cairhien had received the sapling gift. Almost twenty-two spans long, the tapestry stood mounted upright so passersby could watch it unfurl like a moving story, walking in a circle until the end of the story flowed into the beginning once more. The Finn sifted through Moiraine’s memories like that tapestry-- cyclical, repeating, stuck on a loop. 

The tapestry began again. 

As a late-in-life surprise child, her childhood had been solitary, her older half-brother and sisters mostly grown by the time of her birth. By the time they watched her receive the same brutal upbringing everyone received in the Sun Palace, any compassion had been replaced with a stony, uncompromising belief that this treatment made one strong and unyielding, necessary qualities for leadership in a land that required a firm hand and a ruthless mind. In her isolated upbringing, she largely played alone, encountering few children and the most expensive tutors Damodred gold could buy.

Dalresin, her father, had enjoyed his reputation as the sanest of the Damodreds. But as the Finn continued to plumb her deepest memories, helping themselves eagerly to drawers she had sealed shut years ago, she realized she could no longer ignore how the “sanest of the Damodreds” made a pitifully low bar. She loved her father because children need their parents in order to survive. Picking through the evidence of her memories, she saw now that loving him had been a survival strategy. In her desperate childhood focus to be grateful for how her father ruled his family more mercifully than his cruel brothers, the weight of how merciless that still allowed him to be sank into her mind as the hardest truths she had locked in the furthest drawers began to emerge. 

Her father had always been the talk of the nobles: he eschewed politics for scholarship, he married a common scholar rather than a noble, and he did not even beat his daughter to keep her in line! Truly the black sheep of the Damodreds. Yet he doled out tenderness and love without conditions like Feast Day presents meted out at random, keeping her coming back, always on tip toe, for the mere chance of a little. 

And how she had beaten herself mentally for not requiring it physically to obey. For years, she privately berated herself, her weakness, at how she had jumped to serve her father’s every whim. How she loathed that weak and compliant child. She only wanted to be the perfect child he wanted her to be. Yet while her uncles spoke the unsophisticated language of their fists, her father spoke a more elegant, understated language of mental blows. She had occasionally winced under the shaking fist of Uncle Laman and his short, hot temper, but it was the flick of her father’s eyebrow, the quick pulse in his throat, that promised a longer looming storm on the horizon. She had not learned to read the room, to put together miniscule signs and tells, to scan exact wording for the loophole, at the White Tower; her father ensured her fluency in that language years before her initiation as a Novice. Was it any wonder that her first tiny spark of the One Power gave her the ability to eavesdrop, to have preternatural awareness helping her navigate the riptides churning just below the surface of her home life? By the time she left for Tar Valon, she could soothe her father’s temper without his having to ask with anything more than a clench of his jaw. She had prided her skill in diffusing his rage with cleverness and caring. She only wanted him to be happy. He taught her well that that was her job. Fail, and he did not need to hit her when he could simply withdraw from her completely. A bruise would heal quick enough and the lesson would be forgotten; the deliberate and strategic denial of a cherished father’s love imparted the lesson quicker and it lasted longer. Oh, that lesson lasted a long time. 

Why had no one protected her from him? Where were the adults? Siblings, aunts, uncles, friends’ parents, tutors? In the Sun Palace, they all behaved like Dalresin to varying degrees, or otherwise kept to themselves to stay out of the fray. She was trapped in that den of Damodreds with no one to turn to, especially not her mother. Her mother, when she was alive, had only served as her father’s tacit accomplice. Passive and mild-mannered, Innloine Damodred opened her heart into a vessel to contain Dalresin’s gushing anger. She too fell victim to his rages, yet unlike Moiraine, who was just a little girl, her mother possessed coin and estates. She could have chosen freedom, yet she resigned herself to Dalresin and consigned Moiraine to the same. 

Moiraine remembered watching her mother watch her father raging at her. Having a witness reminded her she was not simply imagining her father’s treatment, yet having her mother enable him enraged and confused her. Why did her mother not protect her? She must not have deserved it, her childhood logic had concluded. Her mother’s death, painful in its own right, also felt like more abandonment, for then Moiraine was truly alone with her vituperative father. As the sole parent for most of her childhood, her father’s narrative became the one inside her own head, where she learned to preempt and thus avoid his abuse by supplanting it with her own. Even though she was just a child, she would chastise herself for being childish because sometimes she just wanted her mommy, a mommy who would protect her from daddy. She wanted a protective mother now, and she did not chastise herself anymore. 

Her father was raised--as he had often reminded her-- by Carewin Damodred’s daughter. Queen Carewin, the cold-hearted, notorious monarch who stalked the history books as Cairhien’s most effective--and most vicious--ruler. She had hoarded lessons in cruelty, diligently passing them down to her daughter, who in turn passed them down like treasured family heirlooms to her son. He hurled this fact at her at the slightest whiff of impertinence or ingratitude, reminding her how much worse he had had it than she, how magnanimous he was for sparing the rod. The rod he had spared, yes, but he spared her nothing else, and all the while, she had never questioned her father’s version of events. He told her she behaved like a brat who deserved his temper, who deserved the names he called her, the names reserved for the lowest women. Some of her earliest memories, tasting thin to the Finn, like water poured from a pitcher with fruit in it, bubbled up as she fought them. She saw her father, face contorted with fury, eyes burning with rage, yelling into her face as she tried to look away, tried not to cry where she would be seen. One of her first lessons had been to stay as quiet and unobtrusive as possible, keeping all thoughts and feelings secret, always on guard, lest she bring another unpredictable tyrade upon herself. 

As a child, she believed him when he said she deserved it. He was her father, naturally he knew best, and he knew her better than anyone. As an adult, she never thought of it at all. Yet as the Finn sorted through those memories, like pulling apart candies that had stuck together in the bottom of the bag, as they pulled them out and examined the melted coating before popping them in their mouths, she looked for evidence of her own bad behavior. She found precious little, and that was with the Finn actively searching for it. She found a child behaving like a child. She found a childish father ill-equipped to deal with a child. She did not feel ready to admit that her father’s narrative-- the narrative claiming her bad behavior left him no choice but to treat her in the manner he had-- could be false. It was easier, safer to believe she had deserved it than to accept how hateful her beloved father had truly been. She tried to put it back in a drawer, but the Finn gleefully propped the drawers open and pawed at the treats inside. 

Her father had been dealt many harsh blows by life, which he reminded her of often, to justify his own harsh treatment of her. Her girlhood heart, big and bursting, poured out compassion and sorrow for her father’s pain, allowing him any release that would alleviate some of his hurt. If throwing a book at her head made him feel better, she only dodged it and felt grateful not to have been slapped. Where had there been room for her own hurt? Her father filled her with his own pain until there was no space for her own. Except the Finn, in their ravenous gluttony, seemed to have found her pain where she had hidden it at last, locked in those card catalog drawers until she filled entire bottom rows, sealed them with pitch, and buried the whole cabinet in a flooded basement. 

Her father loved bragging to her that he protected her from the worst abuses of the Sun Palace, abuses perpetrated by everyone else, of course. The Finn curiously tasted this new sweet, calling up more memories from the Sun Palace. The rest of the Damodreds, and other noble families as well, spotted early that the shrewd, bright child of Dalresin could pose a formidable threat one day. Kidnappings, assassinations, and mysterious disappearances simply made up the rules of the Game in the Sun Palace, her father regularly reminded her. Almost like a ritual, her father strategically cut her down in the most public spaces of the palace, a great showman putting on an eye-catching act. He berated her for marks just shy of perfection, for filling out her dresses a touch too much, for any infraction he happened to think of. Only satisfied when tears threatened to spill from her big eyes, he would jerk and drag her down the hallway, retiring to their private rooms, where he would always explain that his _true_ purpose had been to make her appear less of a threat to the other nobles circling like sharks. He had not _really_ meant the horrible things he said. He was protecting her from those other Damodreds who might really hurt her. 

In her childlike logic, she determined not to give her father or the rest of her family any arrows in the quiver of the bow perpetually aimed at her. If even the tiniest of flaws merited public humiliation, she would have to become flawless to protect herself. She learned to be perfect. 

She excelled in her lessons, at history, at the Old Tongue, horseback riding, dancing, etiquette, and finally, at making perfection itself seem effortless. The pursuit of perfection became her armor and overweening confidence became her shield. A well-placed and immaculate curtsy, for example, could go far in the Sun Palace. Her perfect performance of submission kept many a Damodred off her back so she could go about her life in as much peace as she would ever find there. She had had plenty of practice before a petulant fledgling Dragon necessitated that old performance once more. 

When her father was not meting out cruelty, he poured out kindness. Moiraine learned this dance, always performed on tiptoe, always off-balance, just as she had learned the minuet and the reel. He taught her to love books and history and travel. He read to her and she read to him--histories, biographies, novels, poetry. They drank their favorite tea together--Tremalking black-- and exchanged dry Cairhienin repartee until they laughed and laughed. Their favorite color was blue. He had thrown her a ball in celebration of her ability to channel the night before she went off to the White Tower. He created a grand spectacle worthy of all the ostentation of the Sun Palace, a performance of fatherly love to reflect well on her father and how much he loved her; did everyone notice what a wonderful father he was? The rest of the nobility spoke that same malignantly self-conceited language and saw love. She had tried to convince herself it was love.

She had many fond memories of her father, stored in the middle drawers of the card catalog. She could see his face, loving and smiling, as he tucked her into her bed, no trace of rage. “You’re safe and sound,” he intoned. “Good night, little one.” 

She felt warm and happy-- and also like there was something slightly off, like one violin of a quartet not quite in tune. For the longest time, she had believed this was love. Her mother and father told her so, every adult in the Sun Palace told her so, and how her classmates and even teachers in the White Tower had wielded her upbringing against her, to mock her, to insinuate that she was weak and spoiled. She had only ever known the finest clothes, the most precious spices, the rarest books. How could such a child have ever known hardship? And for the longest time, she had believed that her family’s lavish provision of material needs and wants meant that they loved her, even as their love came with strings attached. No kind word came without obligation. No gift came without a hook. If you were clever enough, you learned how to keep your guard up, how to disarm the trap, how to see around the corners and stay one step ahead. She learned young never to trust a smile. Every relationship took more than it gave and every family member loved her exactly as much as they thought they could use her. No wonder she had always loved her horses more than any person. Animals showed her pure love with no agenda, no cruelty, no expectations; animals loved her for her. 

Memories of her dear childhood horse came to her. She and her father, indeed most of the nobility, had had many horses in the stables, but one horse Moiraine had shared a special bond with. Little Moiraine believed Jenferess, whose name came from the Old Tongue word for velvet, was the most beautiful horse she had ever seen. Her pale coat seemed to shine like sateen in the sun and her limpid brown eyes sparkled with intelligence. Adult Moiraine still loved that horse, though she had died of old age long ago, loved the days she would escape the Sun Palace for a few hours on Jenferess’s back. But she felt her mind now desperately trying to shut the drawers, although of course the Finn had propped them open so that they could not shut no matter how hard she scrambled. 

With dread, she felt one of the lowest drawers, on the very bottom row, submerged for so long in that watery cellar, empty its contents at last. The images sprang into her mind, intrusive, glaring, gleefully shoved to the forefront by the Finn. She saw her father, in a true fit of rage, drawing the flat of his hand back. Beating her horse’s flank, again and again. He forced her to watch, helpless, making her beloved pet pay the price for her perceived insubordination. He screamed that he beat the horse to keep from laying his hands on her. She wished he _would_ hit her instead of her innocent horse. Was it any wonder she came to devote her life to the pursuit of justice, to using her Power to Heal and to defend those with less? The kesiera she brought to the White Tower had not been a Damodred House color of red or green; her kesiera had been blue since she had first learned about the Blue Ajah in her childhood tutoring. Joining the Blues, an organization of powerful women dedicated to protecting others, had never been a question. 

Hands on a lock.

“You’re safe and sound.”

Feelings of warmth and happiness and something very off--all the violins off key. 

Dalresin had excused himself for his hurtful actions because of his own childhood; feeling the need to make those excuses must have meant on some level he knew he treated her poorly. According to the gleeman’s tale he had fed her, he could not help himself and he showed as much self-restraint as he was capable of in dealing with a child so difficult to love. She believed his story as a child--how could she have known otherwise?-- and never thought on it as an adult, forgetting the words of the tale but carrying the deep sense of her unlovability as fact. Especially since her father’s death, she had cealed the memories up in his casket, nailing the lid shut and burying them along with him somewhere in the bowels of the Sun Palace’s labyrinthine mausoleum. Yet the Finn reached as though tilting the ale glass all the way back, necks arching, for that last golden drop. They needed her to make the connection she desperately drowned in that watery basement. 

Her father could control himself. 

If he were truly as helpless to control his own actions as he claimed, should he not have treated everyone the same way, indiscriminately? Why had she always served as his only mark, while he managed smiles, charm, and grace at court? He saved his sinister side for her, for private, raging only after the door had shut out the rest of the world. He trafficked in the Damodreds’ favorite currency: secrecy. The Finn hooted, savoring the last trickle they dredged up as it slid down their eager throats. She faced it now: her whole life, she had excused him, filling her heart with sorrow for him until it took up all the space meant for her own feelings. She trusted him when he said he could not help himself because of the way he had been raised. But he could help it. He had been in control the whole time. He had made his choices deliberately. He loved her. He hated her. And he hurt her. 

Each cycle of the Finn accessing the memories hit a little closer to her core, picking her scabs a little deeper. She thought this fourth cycle of draining her and suckling on her memories might finally do her in. She had spent most of her life building her walls, not only the walls to keep others out, but also the internal walls protecting herself from the the painful truths she buried. Each time the Finn tasted her memories, they dismantled the walls a few more bricks at a time, exposing her a little more to her hidden pain. The first time, winter sunlight filtered through cracks in the barriers; this time, a scorching midday sun beat down on her amidst the rubble of her obliterated defenses, blinding and burning her. She was finally fully feeling the force of all of her bottled emotions. She felt a lifetime of pain gushing out in moments. She felt overwhelm, confusion, terror, as the Finn shoved the repressed memories of her childhood abuse into the forefront of her unprotected mind, holding them there like holding her hand to a stove. She felt the onslaught of her suppressed emotions well up, take over, spin wildly out of her control. Sadness. Panic. Rage. Grief. Grief. Grief. 

The Finn drained her at different paces and the memories came at different points in the process each time. This time, the worst memories coincided with the draining of the last drops of her ability. She thought the combination might drive her mad for good this time. It was too much. 

If drawing on the One Power brought that rushing wave of invigorating joy and aliveness and promise, the inverse was also true, as Moiraine had learned in the worst way. The opposite of drawing the One Power, the process of draining it, also brought opposite sensations. The more of the Power one draws, the greater the rush; and likewise, the more of the Power drained, the greater the sorrow. It was too much. 

Hollowness, emptiness, loss, decay, dread. The more the Finn sucked out of her, the more magnified the sense of doom and deadness and darkness-- and they had nearly drained her dry. At the peak of the horror, at the crest of her worst memories, all crashing into her mind simultaneously--

It was too much, she could not bear it any longer, she could not--

Could not what? She had no agency here, no control over her body, no control over her mind. There was no stopping, there was no escape. She was trapped and powerless, just like she was as a child in the Sun Palace. Her worst fears. 

Trapped. 

Powerless. 

No escape. Well, perhaps one way to escape. 

They had told her they killed Lanfear by draining her too quickly. She did not think they expected to feed off of her hope when they explained it. If she channeled--like trying to suck down the sky through a reed straw at this point-- but if she channeled that puny amount faster than they expected, could she trick them into draining her completely, could she trick them into ending this torment right now? 

But no-- some part of her, tiny and distant, thought of Rand, fighting the Last Battle and needing every ounce of help the world had to give him. She thought of Rhuidean, which had shown her countless versions of her own death, but never of her own volition. She thought of the strength of Mat’s ta’veren pull and the strength of Thom’s devotion. She thought of her own determination never to give up, so strong and unshakable until now-- but her knuckles were cracked and white from trying to hold onto her hope as this maelstrom tried to rip her from it. Trapped. Powerless. She wailed in her mind, wordless and anguished. Trapped. Powerless. Her worst fears. It was too much. Oh Light, oh Light, let it stop-- 

She could no longer feel her body, her limbs numb to the shifting mist caressing her and the cool stone slab supporting her. Nothing felt real. In a break between memories, the spell of the Finn thinned, and she opened her eyes. In a daze, she wondered if she were really here at all, wherever “here” was. The black stone columns, had they always looked like that? The strange yellow light seemed stranger, as if she saw it for the first time. She knew the hissing whispers in her ears belonged to the Finn, but only intellectually; their voices did not sound real, though she knew they must be. She closed her eyes, feeling the world spin around her. 

The Finn fed off of every emotion, not only the worst ones-- although after her Power, nothing tasted as good as traumatic stress, relived again and again as though happening in real time. Plain memories, accessed as preserved recollections rather than reliving, tasted a little plainer in comparison, like a dried apricot versus one plucked off the tree, ripe and sun-warm, sticky juice trickling down the chin. 

But the Finn believed in cleaning their plates. They scraped up the last bits, milder than the first course. More memories, better memories, arose. 

As a Novice in the White Tower, guarded and quiet, Moiraine felt fearful of everyone around her, seeing plots everywhere as the Sun Palace had reasonably taught her. In those early months at the Tower, Dalresin’s explosive anger erupted out of her own mouth and heart for the first time, aimed at her peers. She had instinctively moved up the food chain, operating under the Sun Palace logic that one either ate or got eaten, mistaking her newfound freedom to treat others the way she had hated to be treated as liberation. Siuan had taken her in like a street cat, hissing and flinching, loving that defensive stray until she learned how to be loved and to love in return. Siuan’s love had been a waterskin with cold, clear water streaming out, when Moiraine had lived in a desert her whole childhood, where a parched, aching throat was daily life and no one had taught her what “thirsty” meant. The Finn sipped her love for Siuan like nectar, her girlhood infatuation a trickle of pure sweetness. As girls had grown into women and gone their separate ways, her love for Siuan opened up into a quiet, steady flow of something deeper, more robust and complex, residing somewhere deep and still. 

When they were students and young loves in the White Tower, Siuan had often referenced the Night Sea Journey to Moiraine, usually in reference to their tests for Accepted and the shawl. Moiraine had needed Siuan to explain most of her sailing metaphors--after seeing how long she could go without fully comprehending them. The Night Sea Journey, Siuan had explained, referred to much more than simply sailing at night. The Night Sea Journey meant finding yourself plunged into dangerous waters in the dark and without any of the bearings that meant safety, comfort, familiarity, and survival--no sun, no wind, no birds, no predictable currents. The Night Sea Journey meant going through terror and danger and still managing to find a way to survive through that long, treacherous night to see the dawn. The Night Sea Journey meant finding strength you never knew you had in you because you had to; it meant coming out the other side as a completely different person as the cost of survival. Perhaps she had never truly understood until now. 

She prayed that Siuan was well in Salidar, still feeling her mind try to go through that old, familiar motion of putting hard feelings back in the drawer. But all the drawers splayed wide open now and there was no ignoring the contents anymore. She felt her sadness and guilt and fear over Siuan, feelings she could not have felt and still functioned these last few years. How she had pushed away all those she loved most-- out of necessity. For survival. If she had needed to bury her love for Siuan to protect their secret quest-- if she had needed to get Thom and his ill-informed meddling out of Tear-- if she had transferred Lan’s bond to save his life-- then what had it mattered if she also pushed them away before loving them inevitably hurt her somehow. Loving someone--opening your heart to be loved by someone--posed too great a risk. The world all but openly described what they saw when they looked at her: a malicious, conniving creature to be reviled and avoided at all costs. Sometimes Thom had been the most vocal in his repulsion for her even as she fostered her quiet love for him in spite of herself. Even as she invited him to share her bed in Tear by night and return to plotting like strangers by day. It would not have been the first time she loved a man who acted like he could not decide if he loved or loathed her; her father had shown her nothing less. 

What hateful dig against Aes Sedai, against her very core, would she not endure for the feel of Thom’s tender hand smoothing the blanket over her shoulder? 

She had felt so justified in twisting Thom this way and that, and even the renowned Grey Fox felt easy to maneuver about as she pleased, a cat batting a mouse out of boredom, playing with her food. When the stakes rose as high as winning Tarmon Gai’don, the ends easily justified the means. Yet in the harsh light of Sidhol laying bare her every thought and feeling like battle plans scattered across a table, the mechanism of her tactic against him repulsed her now. To make the man she loved cry? In flaunting a skill she knew he admired, she had created a self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing Thom’s perception of all Aes Sedai, herself included. The Finn sampled her guilt and ordered more. 

She delivered, ruminating on her mistreatment of Thom. The three-step trick of manipulation felt so simple that she performed it as unconsciously and effortlessly as she embraced the Source: fear, obligation, guilt. Once one learned the levers of power, reverting to respectable negotiation did not come easily, not with all its messiness and inefficiency. Sometimes it did not occur to her at all.

Step one, make your mark fear you so they decide for themselves it is too risky to disobey or disappoint you and safer to simply deliver what you want. Every Aes Sedai completed this part without trying by virtue of her status, but some performed more terrifying displays of the One Power than others. A Grey sister negotiating a peace treaty in Arad Doman, for example, or a Brown sister taking notes on indigenous species of butterfly in Illian, perhaps, appeared less spectacularly fearsome than a Blue sister, say, sinking a ferry in a whirlpool, slaughtering fists of trollocs with earthquakes and fire, or blasting a Forsaken into oblivion with balefire. 

Step two, create a sense of indebtedness to make your mark feel yet more urgently the need to do what you want them to do. For example, heal someone’s leg when they believe their injury incurable. 

Step three, foster a sense of guilt in the mark for not obeying. Think of poor Elayne, practically still a child, practically _his_ child, fending for herself in the vipers’ nest of Tanchico without protection. Only a cruel, selfish person would _not_ fly to her aid. 

And when those steps failed, as they sometimes did in the most stubborn of marks, she dredged up the morsel she had stashed for an emergency, wielding his deepest pain like a switch to teach him a lesson for not obeying her immediately. 

“I would not have hurt you if you had done what I wanted the first time,” she had told him. It could have been her father speaking. 

Tears leaked silently down her temples, into her hair. She had ached every time her family taught her those steps the hard way, molding her into the obedient little girl she felt so ashamed of, the little girl who had traded her voice, her mind, her very self, willing to barter anything to avoid the pain her father could inflict so casually, crushed under the weight of that awful resigned compliance. She had learned the wrong lesson. Frightened and frightening, she had become the one inflicting the pain with that same deft hand on the man she loved most in the world. 

Her dearest Thom. The Finn perked up as if their small plates had cleared away and their main dish was arriving. Oh, Light, sometimes she felt completely swept away by her love for Thom, astonished that she could feel anything so deeply. The memories formed in her mind, memories stored in the top drawers, the drawers that slid open easily. She had scarcely been able to comprehend her eyes and ears when she encountered the Grey Fox, the infamous expert on the Game of Houses, performing as a mere gleeman in that Andoran backwater. She should have known she was in trouble when her first reaction was intrigue. 

In that dilapidated barn, he invited himself on her quest, _telling_ her he was coming along, _telling off_ her Warder in his insistence. “I am not a cheese for slicing,” his precise wording had been. She had tucked that ridiculous line away, along with his bravery, and his foolhardiness, and his wit, and the way he masked his subtlety with ostentation. Min’s vision in Baerlon had shocked her at the time, yet in retrospect, naturally she would have to have the most brilliant schemer in the Westlands for herself. He intrigued her. 

On the Caemlyn Road with the Two Rivers folk, his voice sang her to sleep. In Whitebridge he risked his life and gave his health to protect the boy she would--had?-- given her own life to save, her gratitude for his dedication rising as he relieved a fraction of her burden out of simple kindness. In Cairhien, she had gotten to watch, vicariously from her eyes and ears, as the virtuoso picked up his instrument for a final encore with Galldrian. When others buzzed about her skill at the Game, their flattery bored her; when Thom admired her skill, she fluttered inside. _He assassinates kings and he thinks_ I _possess skill._ She felt herself become hopelessly intrigued. 

In Tear, his blue eyes made her breath catch. At last, they connected, they had a stretch of uninterrupted time in the same city, space to be alone together. She could not run from her intrigue anymore when he came to her audience room and then her sitting room and then her bedroom. With political conversation off-limits in those fraught days in the Stone, they found other ways to explore what intrigued them, every encounter only heightening a curiosity that refused to be satisfied. When two Daes Dae’mar masters set their sights on each other with a mutual end goal in mind, it does not take long for both of them to win the Game. He started to visit her every night. He started to feel like home. He rubbed her neck, smoothed her hair from her face, and sometimes, he simply looked at her with such a look she thought her heart would stop. She started to look forward to their early mornings even more than their late nights, laughing over tea and toast with their hair still mussed. She remembered the first night he shared her bed even though she fell straight to sleep, remembered the joy she felt upon waking in the middle of the night to realize he had stayed just to hold her. In his sleep, he squeezed her tighter. She felt so safe it made her ache. Winning her heart in spite of her had been perhaps his most devastating Daes Dae’mar maneuver yet. They studiously avoided saying the words. But the problem was, their actions sang. She loved him, and she felt loved by him. 

If he came for her, if they made it out of here alive, if he would have her, she would make it her mission to marry that man even if the Last Battle claimed them right after. 

If he came for her. If they made it out alive. 

If he would have her. 

Perhaps she was not worth forgiving. She could forgive him for not forgiving her. Even if that fate condemned her to death in this miserable place. Min had never been wrong, right? Moiraine protected her heart by feeling most feelings as righteous anger, frustration, anxiety, even panic. This stream of pure sadness hurt so much worse; it tasted downright decadent to the Finn. 

Feeling the sadness, the love, the grief, feeling this lifelong backlog of emotional call slips disgorged from that rotting card catalog, overwhelmed and exhausted her and it hurt. And it healed. She drained the basement, she cleared out the ruined furniture, she threw the card catalog in the midden heap. She poured sunlight in. 

She had run from so many truths for so long, running from one corner of the Westlands to the other, filling her mind with the urgency of her quest, trying to fill her heart with prophecies fulfilled, until she had run out of places to run. 

She had spent her adult life focusing on the fact that ultimately, after a childhood of fear and suspicion, no Damodred had actually harmed her as her father had terrorized her into anticipating. But it seemed so clear now that that version of the story belonged to Dalresin, and it was demonstrably false. A Damodred _had_ hurt her. The Damodred whose words said he protected her, but whose actions had done more harm than she had ever let herself acknowledge. He had not protected her. He had hurt her. 

The memory of Dalresin saying good night started again, and it continued this time. His face, warm and loving, showed no trace of rage. “You’re safe and sound,” he intoned as he tucked her into bed and left the room. She settled into her covers, body tense, and as soon as his footsteps faded, she climbed out of bed, her little feet making no sound on the thick carpets. Pausing, she plucked her kesiera from the nightstand and held it before her face, eyes closing in the darkness as she concentrated. She did not know how, but it helped her attune to her surroundings and detect hidden dangers. Even with her hearing amplified, she heard nothing but her own breath. She crept out of her room into the large living space of the apartments she shared with her father, through the parlor and sitting room, to the antechamber, where she checked the lock. It was not locked. 

Moiraine saw the little girl’s hands sliding the deadbolts and chain into place, feelings of safety on the heels of worry. Now she could sleep peacefully. 

Her father had not protected her. He had endangered her, and she had had to protect herself. She saw it now. The memory, once a splintered shard disconnected from the rest of her thoughts, knitted together, integrating into the full pattern of her memories. His words said she was safe while her instincts knew she was not. He frightened her with threats of kidnappings while leaving their doors unlocked while trying to make her believe he protected her. The memory of the lock was not a one-time image, as she had first thought, but a composite, the steady drip drip of thousands of nights she locked her door because her father did not. And she had somehow known he would not. She had never turned to face this memory before, her mind insisting breezily that he simply forgot as it hurriedly shut the drawers. But now she saw that he had been calculating ways to make her doubt and mistrust herself, to make her afraid and dependent on him, to put her in danger. In locking that door to feel safe, she had locked herself inside the cage of a mean monster who looked like a kind man, a monster whose pointy smile convinced her that the outside world was worse, who invited her to stay for dinner as he prepared to feast. Mourning the monstrousness of the father she had held so dear, she accepted at last that she would have been safer far, far away from him than she had been, trapped and powerless, inside that cage with him. 

Moiraine saw that little girl locking the door, really looked at her. She was brave and determined and doing what she must to survive in a dangerous place that hardened her into a suspicious and mistrustful creature, unable to open up because she needed to hide to stay safe. Instead of hating that flawed little girl, Moiraine felt a surge of compassion for her. She had tried so hard. Moiraine felt glad to let that scared little girl who was trapped in the Sun Palace know that her hard work had worked. She made it out, she escaped from that awful place where no one protected her, where the one person who should have loved and cared for her attacked her and cut her down instead. She did grow up, she did become an Aes Sedai of the Blue Ajah, and she did use her powers to protect others. 

The tangle of her ignored past transformed into clear straight lines leading to the present and extending into the future she prayed for. As an Aes Sedai, she had found the perfect way to escape from the Sun Palace while still utilizing her terrible skill set for good. She submitted like saidar to her worst Cairhienin instincts, channeling them into worthy causes rather than getting devoured by them like her disowned family had. 

She could see that skill set for what it was. She had waded into herself and all the terrible things that made her _her._ Her adeptness at secrecy, her expertise at deception and finesse for manipulation, her dry wit and hypervigilance and uncanny intuition, her deep need for solitude, it all stemmed from those brutal, formative years in the Sun Palace. 

Her secrets kept people safe. Her manipulation provided Rand with strategies that moved him closer to his destiny. Her solitude gave her space to study the Karaethon Cycle, history, diplomacy, balefire, and everything else required to support the Dragon, the world, and the future she fought for. 

She did not know warmth, gentleness, or tenderness, but she did know goodness. She knew how to be good, in her own way. By joining the Blue Ajah, by harnessing every ill-gotten skill in the purpose of the Light, by fighting for justice. By saving the world. 

Agony became despair became grief became deep, abiding sadness. Slowly, sadness gave way to acceptance. Peace. 

The hurt and the sadness did not disappear; they merely became smaller than the peace, more quiet. Even drained nearly entirely of her ability, the sense of calm persisted this time. She had awoken thrice before to find her powers more than restored; she believed it would happen a fourth time. She possessed the inborn ability to channel, and like her determination and resilience, her ability was an inherent part of her. The Finn could drink it up but they could not permanently rob her of it. Like fingernails or hair, her ability would grow back once again. 

As if the last bites of their meal tasted slightly off, the Finn’s interest in her suddenly waned and they put her back into that coma-like, Power-regenerating sleep. Only a tiny spark of the Power remained in her, yet her anguish had been replaced by calm. She was surviving the Night Sea Journey. Min’s visions were never wrong, and Moiraine had not yet married Thom. She had seen him coming in Rhuidean; all he needed was time. He would forgive her because one instance of mistreatment did not outweigh the love they created together in Tear, deep and intense enough to sustain them both through all this time apart. And even if she escaped, nearly powerless, tomorrow, she possessed within her the skills, the knowledge, the drive and dedication and passion to help the Dragon fight the Last Battle. And she possessed the bracelet that, even in her current state, could flood her with so much of the One Power it left her pulsating with more than enough strength to do whatever the Pattern demanded of her. For the fourth time, everything went black.

***

Waking up felt different this time, though at first she could not say why. Usually, upon waking out of that heavy, odd slumber they put her in, she felt the strange light on her face first. Then came that dark dread, sharp in the pit of her stomach, jolting her awake, the pangs of panic and dismay striking as she remembered where she lay. This time, waking moved slow, soft. The light filtering through her heavy eyelids seemed a warmer glow. Was she… moving? She felt like she was being jostled somehow. With the Finn, she remained almost unaware of her body as they feasted on her mind. But now, she felt wonderfully embodied, physically coming alive in the most vibrant way, her toes curling, her fingers outstretching, her shoulders relaxing, her heart beating. Strangest yet, she became aware of the most lovely feeling of being wrapped up and held close. After an interminable limbo lying alone and naked on a slab, she nestled into something warm, familiar, comforting. Gradually, faint earthy scents of pine and tabac smoke drifted into her consciousness, enveloping her like the woolen blanket she must be bundled in. 

As if through thick fog, she could hear voices, human voices, eerie-sounding after only hearing human voices in her worst memories for so long. The spark of hope blossoming in her middle terrified her, but she could not quash it down. And perhaps if she had learned anything in this ordeal, it was _not_ to quash everything down. She held the spark and just let it be. Through the tumult growing around them, she thought she could identify those voices: Thom’s and Mat’s and one other’s, a man she did not know. She had been here in this moment once before, in Rhuidean, the ragged scrap of the recollection blazing with sudden clarity once more. She knew how it ended. 

_I am safe,_ she thought, allowing herself to drift off into a lighter, natural slumber as warmth washed over her, knowing she was secure in the arms of her love. She would wake soon, and she would be ready. 

As she drifted off, she reached for the Source, its life-affirming light a faint glimmer as though through grave dirt. She could not hold enough saidar even to imagine herself as a blossom opening to the light of the Source; she was a seed, still underground, putting out her first tiny tendril. But she felt that tiny tendril unfurl. Just as pruning the ancient branches of Avendoraldera had cleared the way for bursts of new growth, her powers had returned stronger each time the Finn had drained her to the roots. She cupped that little seedling to herself, cherishing it. All she had to do was grow.

**Author's Note:**

> When I first read these books growing up, Aes Sedai deceit and manipulation didn’t feel mysterious to me, it felt like home. If any of these traits, behaviors, thought patterns, or emotions feel familiar to you, I highly recommend finding online communities and reading about C-PTSD and narcissistic abuse, such as reddit/raisedbynarcissists and https://outofthefog.website/. Bessel van der Koek’s _The Body Keeps the Score_ and Pete Walker’s _CPTSD_ have been invaluable to my recovery. 
> 
> In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255


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